Just Col

Look no further than Sophy Ridge’s post this morning to see how easily the Westminster lobby is taken for a ride on Net Zero. Sky’s lead presenter breathlessly announces £12bn for two offshore wind projects "off the east coast of Scotland". They aren’t in Scotland. They are Norfolk Vanguard East and West—50km off East Anglia. No 10 slipped "Scotland" into a press release, and the lobby typed it out without checking a map. If they won’t check which country a £12bn project is in, they certainly won’t check the balance sheet. Strip away the slogans from Ed Miliband’s zealots and look at the financial engineering. We are told this is "homegrown British energy." In reality, it is a 50:50 joint venture between German giant RWE and New York private equity firm KKR. Taxpayers are handing over £1bn from the National Wealth Fund to de-risk their equity, while locking households into a 20-year inflation-linked Contract for Difference at £91.20/MWh in 2024 prices—well over £100/MWh today. For two decades, your energy bill will legally underwrite the guaranteed yield of a Wall Street fund. Where do the industrial jobs go? Not here. The 184 turbines come from Denmark’s Vestas, backed by Danish export finance. Worse, the steel monopile foundations were promised to the SeAH factory at Teesworks in Redcar. In April, RWE pulled the plug on the Teesside contract for Vanguard West—triggering North East job cuts—and outsourced fabrication to Bilbao in Spain and Nordenham in Germany, underwritten by German export agency Euler Hermes. British taxpayers put up the £1bn subsidy; German and Spanish factories get the heavy engineering. Then look at the environmental reality Net Zero ideologues ignore. Building 184 15MW turbines requires over 400,000 tonnes of virgin blast-furnace steel, thousands of tonnes of copper, and Chinese rare-earth neodymium and dysprosium mined in toxic conditions. To connect it, developers are using compulsory purchase powers to rip a 60km, 45m-wide trench—wider than a motorway—through prime Norfolk farmland from Happisburgh to Necton, pouring tens of thousands of tonnes of concrete into 150 jointing bays and a 300m converter substation. Before a single blade turns, the embedded carbon from smelting steel, curing concrete, and running diesel jack-up vessels across the North Sea is vast. The switchgear relies on sulphur hexafluoride (SF6)—a gas 23,500 times more potent than CO2 that lingers for 3,200 years. And when these turbines hit the end of their 20-year subsidy life? We are left with 552 epoxy-resin blades, each 115m long, which cannot be economically recycled at scale and end up shredded, incinerated, or buried in landfill, while 400,000 tonnes of rusting steel stay driven into the seabed. Yet Kemi Badenoch and the Tories now tour studios calling Net Zero "fantasy politics," hoping we have amnesia. Look at her record: In June 2019, she waved through Theresa May’s statutory Net Zero 2050 target in 90 minutes without objection. In 2022, she boasted at the dispatch box that Net Zero would cost "under 2% of GDP." She sat in the Cabinet that passed the Energy Act 2023, expanding the exact CfD subsidy racket behind this £12bn RWE/KKR stitch-up. The uniparty built this machine together, mortgaging our industrial base to foreign utilities and private equity, giving Britain the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world while paying gas stations to sit on standby when wind drops to 4%. Only Reform UK—led by Nigel Farage and Richard Tice—will rip up the Net Zero mandates, scrap the CfD racket, fast-track domestic North Sea oil, gas, and modular nuclear, and stop treating British billpayers as a cash cow for global finance.